Better Basic Video Editing Hardware

el conquistador

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Aug 21, 2010
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I have a home built PC and I bought a new HD Camera and I want to edit videos better without buying a Mac. I have an Athlon II 635 (x4 2.9Ghz), 4GB RAM, and built in ATI Radeon HD 4200 GPU (128MB DDR3) and 700w P/S. I have Windows 7 x64.

1) Should I have more RAM or better video card? Why does it take so long to render, process videos I want to edit? Is this strictly a processor limitation or will RAM/GPU help this?
2) For video editing, what spec is important on the video card (CUDA Cores, etc) and what value to I get out of a new GPU?
3) When I use video software my system overheats and shuts down, will video card help distribute workload (and therefore heat) and stop this issue? I fully understand I have a heating issue and intend on fixing it but this kind of relates to my second question of whether the computer distributes the workload.

Much appreciated.
 

blackdevilmt

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Nov 12, 2012
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i/ii)Having more ram such as 8-16gb helps alot in rendering,if you're going to do some 3D modeling eh helps alot. Thee ATI 4200 gpu is a little bit low I'd say get a graphic card. Nowadays a gtx 480 is pretty much cheap considering it's force or buy a 7850,560ti if you can afford go for the 670.


iii) Well, you are running on a stock cooler that's why system over heats and shuts down to protect the cpu from getting burned. I'd say get http://www.coolermaster-usa.com/product.php?product_id=3053&product_name=Hyper%20212%20EVO .It's cheap and very good.Clean the cpu from that grease with some isopropyl and buy the artic mx-4 and do a pea method in centre (read guides) and you can overclock the cpu a little bit to 3.2ghz easily without burning it.(Also search for the AMD overclocking thread).

Well I wouldn't buy a mac that's utterly stupid it is so much over priced and at the end of the day what's the gain? Spending more money that's a big NO.
 

burntpizza

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Jun 23, 2012
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Also for gpu if you can afford it, get AMD Radeon HD 7970, HD 7970 GHZ, HD 7950 Boost, or Radeon hd 7870. They have much better gpu compute performance than current generation nvidia card. A mid-range HD 7870 can beat GTX 680 in compute.
 

el conquistador

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Aug 21, 2010
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This is advice is fantastic. Thank you.

Can you give me a one or two sentence 101 on how the GPU helps video editing? How a GPU helps games is kind of straight forward due to the high paced level of detail these games are kicking out but video editing (not 3D) seems to be a different beast.